Right, squash-and-rebase is not very good. You want meaningful history. So if you have a feature branch that adds some feature consisting of N sub-features, R

Right, squash-and-rebase is not very good. You want meaningful history. So if you have a feature branch that adds some feature consisting of N sub-features, R refactorings, B bug fixes, then you want N+R+B commits. The commits you squash are the "fixup" commits; all others stay. You also want good commit order. Basically, write your code, commit, then refactor your commits so that you get nice history of all the changes you made as if you were starting from the final state of play (because you are).